number 34 • Winter 2018

The Public Interest

Slouching towards Berkeley: socialism in one city

Winter 1989

THE MEETING of the Berkeley City Council that coincided with the beginning of the 1988 riots on the West Bank was an unusual happening, even for a city where municipal polities often attains the status of performance art. Five hundred people showed up at the Berkeley Community Theater, after running a paper gauntlet of handouts from Revolution Books, the Israel Action Committee, and Jews Opposed to the Occupation, as well as one anonymous publisher who was distributing typewritten recipes for Molotov cocktails. Inside the crowded theater small groups of Jews in yarmulkes were shouting and jabbing fingers at each other while women wearing hadas, black-and-white Palestinian shawls, looked on.